Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Albert Gidari is the Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was a partner for over 20 years at Perkins Coie LLP, achieving a top-ranking in privacy law by Chambers. He negotiated the first-ever "privacy by design" consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Google, which required the establishment of a comprehensive privacy program including third party compliance audits. Mr.

Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights.

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

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Imagine a world, not as distant as we might like to think, where our individual thought processes are aided and improved by technologies external to the biologically-bequeathed neural matter that sits within our skulls and throughout our nervous systems. Further, these technologies are designed and optimized to perform these functions in such a way as to become automatic or invisible to their user. And rather than act as simple one-way conduits or repositories, they actively drive their user's thinking in a manner that creates a two-way, symbiotic interaction between human and device.

The WikiLeaks CIA release: When will we learn?

In my previous blog on propaganda, I noted private information, when stolen and published, can prove useful for propaganda efforts. This post develops that concept in more detail, with an emphasis on privacy considerations.

I agree with interpretations of the First Amendment finding important protections for publication of private information without consent. And I concur that, as a matter of principle, the public interest can justify such publication. But too often the “public interest” defense is rather often a post hoc rationalization rather than a reasoned justification.

Contemporary analyses give insufficient weight to privacy and information security interests. Such interests often outweigh the public interest value of making private information public without the consent of the owner or data subject, but that weight may not be recognized. Some reasons for this potentially include media business models that reward clicks and attention, increased partisan polarity (and the utility of such disclosures for propaganda), mistrust of government, and insufficient enforcement of laws on cybercrime.

No one wants to live in a “dumb” city. But I question whether anyone ought to want to live in a really smart city either. I’d prefer to just live in a smarter city -- one that puts my privacy and security first before rolling out ubiquitous sensors and broad-scale data collection in the name of some larger public good.

Imagine that a random car is periodically driving across your front yard, leaving tire treads and gouges on your otherwise pristine lawn. How would you handle it? You might set up a surveillance camera to capture an image of the license plate and driver and then share the image with the police. You might install a fence.

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington who specializes in legal issues related to technology, said Amazon’s new service relies on the same kind of trust homeowners commonly extend to services to which they hand over their keys. But he said those agreements often involve in-person interactions, which won’t happen when homeowners allow Amazon to unlock its doors.

“It raises questions about how do you specify and police expectations when the relationship is one mediated almost entirely by technology?” Mr. Calo said."

Malkia Cyril is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice, an organization best known for its leadership in the fight for net neutrality. But Cyril, who uses the pronouns “they” and ”them,” is now embroiled in a related but distinct fight—one they call “protecting Black dissidents from the FBI.” It’s a fight they’ve been preparing for since they were born to parents who were members of the Black Panther Party.

"“What is the public actually getting for its money?” asked Harlan Yu, a principal at Upturn, a firm that works on technology policy issues. “Are body cameras actually worth it, or are we just going by our speculation and intuition that they’re actually going to change the way policing is done in America?”"

"“This is the most important empirical study on the impact of police body-worn cameras to date,” said Harlan Yu from Upturn, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit consulting company that studies how technology affects social issues. It was not directly involved in the research. “The results call into question whether police departments should be adopting body-worn cameras, given their high cost.”"

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Join Ed Palmieri, Facebook, and Katherine Tassi (Deputy General Counsel, Privacy and Product - Snap), for a conversation about their experiences as privacy counsel dealing with products and services that serve literally billions of users. Sponsored by the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. CIS Director of Privacy Albert Gidari will moderate the discussion.

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Jennifer Granick talks about how notions of privacy have changed over the years and where she thinks things are headed in the future. She is a professor at the Stanford School of Law and Director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society, where she specializes in the intersection of engineering, privacy and the law.

Last week Yahoo announced that 500 million accounts had been hacked – consumer names, email addresses, phone messages, passwords and birth dates were stolen. It is one of the biggest security breaches in history. We’re been seeing a lot more cyber attacks on companies, individuals and the government in recent years. So who is behind them and what can consumers do to protect ourselves online?

"Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Steven Englehardt studied how all the things we do not see as users are valuable to someone on our digital trail, as our presence may be authenticated and tracked through such minutia as personalized browser settings or even our laptops' battery levels.